PHOTOGLYPHIC
MARS Gallery, Melbourne, Nov 2023
A glyph is an incised mark denoting a graphic symbol. In my exhibition, Photoglyphics, carved letters of the alphabet are cast in clear and pigmented resins to create 3-D objects, then arranged on a flatbed scanner with coloured gels and filters. The scans are taken at very high resolution and record the effects of light passing through layers of the letters in great detail, revealing scratches, bubbles and other imperfections.
Text, colour and light combine to create amalgams of letters that are recognisable as word forms, but unreadable as narrative, text becomes image.
In a world where there is an incessant and cacophonous stream of text presented on screens and other media, meaning is often reduced to slogans and hollow signs. Words seem drained of significance, the visual equivalent of white noise.
These works intend to reflect this state of affairs but also to slow the contemplation of words and language into something evocative, intriguing and mysterious, something that may help to rehabilitate an expanded rather than diminished field of possibilities for the glyphs of our contemporary world.
Photoglyphics
catalogue essay by Stephen Haley accompanying exhibition Photoglyphics, MARS Gallery, Melbourne, 2023
We Moderns record and reproduce the world, and everything in it, using words and images. Printed texts and photographs, now both digital, have become the primary mediums. These traces represent existence; then invert the relationship, to stand between us and experience, becoming the means – the mediums - by which we see, navigate and understand the world we inhabit. What seems to be a reflection, becomes a map. It is all very complicated - the arena that both art and philosophy fundamentally wrestles with.
In Penelope Davis’ recent exhibition, Photoglyphics, words become fragmented letters and photographs, cropped details. They picture, not the world directly, but the things that trace the world – words and images. Both are glyphs - symbolic marks - but here etched with light, hence the portmanteau: Photoglyph. These stunning coloured pictures with their complex internal rhythms and flows are photographs made without a traditional camera. They are a unique synthesis of sculpture, photography and phrase. Pre-made letters were moulded in silicon, then cast in transparent and pigmented resin - a process which echos traditional photography’s shift from negative to positive and back again. The ghostly letters were arranged haphazardly onto a flatbed scanner, scanned at very high resolutions and then the artist wandered the digitised vista on screen; much like a traditional photographer might wander a city, seeking arresting moments to snap in camera. Tiny moments were revealed, cropped, enlarged and printed as final images, becoming rhapsodies in colour and form.
In recent times though, words and images seem to have broken. No longer pellucid descriptions, more often they are cacophonies that assail us - a morass of meaning - arising from, who knows where? They confidently declare unverifiable things, becoming sensations rather than meanings. These images reflect this state. Their production techniques echo the highly mediated nature of our lived conditions and their vibrant colours, the intensity of our felt, contemporary experience. Are they a celebration or a warning? A mirror or a map? Words and images, each becoming the other. What are they trying to say?
Stephen Haley